Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol told Fox Business last week he’s “ahead of schedule” in his plan to turn the faltering coffee company around.
Ahem, a year since Niccol pledged to improve the Starbucks environment and speed up ordering times, its stores – at least the ones in the Big Apple – are plagued by the curse of the app-driven service business: Lack of floor management.
If Starbucks actually has bosses, they’re in their offices counting coffee beans.
Starbucks’ sales fell for the sixth straight time, down two percent between April 1 and June 30 this year. They won’t improve until customers’ experiences live up to Niccol’s idea of what it should be.
The absence of old-school management – i.e., “You do this, you don’t do that” – is obvious to a guy like me who’s enjoyed Starbucks coffee since they opened in my Upper East Side building thirty years ago. And it gets worse every year.
Many branches are filthy. My friend found Starbucks at Lexington Avenue and East 77th Street as gross as the subway station next door.
Mounds of malodorous garbage filled the bathroom which an employee unlocked for him. There was no toilet paper.
“It was disgusting,” he said. So were overflowing trash bins at the “condiment” counter. This after the barista made the wrong drink – not double macchiato he ordered, but plain espresso.
I’m ready to quit Starbucks for another reason too – the same reason millions of other java junkies are doing it. Namely, endless waits for even the simplest products. It can take half a lifetime to get a no-frills cappuccino.
“Improvements” Starbucks is making to “restore the warmth and human connection that defines our brand,” as Niccol told the New York Times, bog things down even more.
Although he said they got rid of a few unpopular drinks, categories continue to mushroom, baffling customers and frustrating servers.
“This is so unfair,” a young woman, clearly a Starbucks rookie, giggled as she struggled to decipher lists of “coffeehouse classics,” cold coffee and espresso, tea lattes, pumpkin beverages, pecan beverages, “refresher” beverages” and “blended cappuccinos.”
I could do laundry in the time it took her and her girlfriends to decide and communicate their order to the poor guy behind the counter.
The Starbucks app and Starbucks card cause problems almost every time. They require long discussions and repeated trial-and-error to make the damn things work.
Which is why I pay in old-fashioned cash – even though some employees recoil in terror from printed currency and struggle to make change.
Niccol’s pledge to deliver products to customers within four minutes is contradicted by an idiotic new rule for baristas to write “personal messages” on cups.
Most baristas wisely ignore it. When I asked one why she didn’t scribble something warm and fuzzy, she cheerfully passed the buck to a fellow barista. “I’m giving it to you, but I didn’t make it – he did,” she said with a wink.
A sugar-and-ice bomb called Strawberry Matcha Strato Frappucino – a coffee-less concoction that packs 300 calories and 36 grams of sugar in just twelve ounces – requires two different blenders and six ingredients to make, one overwhelmed barista told the New York Times.
Mine took just three minutes at a slow time. But earlier, when the place was busier, a colleague of mine waited eleven minutes at the same West 48th Street location for iced green tea lemonade.
Of course, floor managers who actually direct the work and hold employees accountable would likely piss off Gen-Z staffers who aren’t used to being told what to do.
But customers have options, too – such as to skip Starbucks and get our morning lift from coffee machines in our offices.
It’s easier – and free of aggravation.